The following case study of Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing is written after experiencing two-quarters of an experiment on both Digital & Traditional Marketing done on a financial consulting firm of AUSTRALIA that provides loans to its customers such as personal loans, payday loans, business loans and vehicle loans.

By the following article, I will briefly describe the results of digital marketing campaigns done for this brand, I can’t reveal the brand name as its a request from the client. Why? Because competitors will easily come to know what kind of marketing technique they are really using to get such massive leads and ROI.

Before digging further first of all let me clarify what is digital marketing and what is traditional.

Digital Marketing – When we promote any brand or product or service through digital mediums with the power of the Internet it is called digital marketing. i.e Social media, search engines, emails, SMS, e-commerce platforms, Paid Ads.

Traditional Marketing- The traditional marketing at the other hand is the same marketing technique that does not use any digital medium and mostly done with one to one conversation or meeting or through traditional ads.

Before implementing Digital Marketing for my client:-

The Australian based financial firm was having its own traditional marketing unit, sales managers and sales team. Two teams having 3 executives and 1 manager for each team that reported to the sales head. The sales head was responsible for sales targets.

There was 1 telle caller who used to call random numbers from yellow pages and fixed the meeting when meetings are fixed the salesperson used to close the leads. But rarely they were able to close any leads i.e most of the leads were irrelevant or the customer did not want a loan at all. You can say some sales pitchy push marketing leads.

Apart from these the company also implemented some local marketing techniques i.e banners, brochures, holdings etc.

In each sales meetings, the figures constantly went below. When both the sales teams were asked about the degrowth in sales they explained the same to the sales head. And when they were asked about the reasons this is what they said –

Leads are irrelevant

Customers don’t need a loan right now

Customers are avoiding us when we call

The customer has no trust in us as we don’t have a website or online repayment platform

They will let us know when they need a loan

Now let’s calculate the cost and time that was spent on these two teams:

Sales head salary – 11000$ P.M (AUD)

Sales managers x 2 – 4500×2 = 9000$ P.M (AUD)

Sales Executives – 1500×6 = 9000$ P.M (AUD)

TOTAL – 29000 Per Month (AUD) cost to the company.

Let’s talk about the results:

In two quarters they only converted 78 customers. And the target given was 150. Which generated 78000$ AUD for the company. And if we calculate 2 quarters 29000×6 = 174,000 $ AUD.

Now the company was running at 174,000 – 78,000 = 96,000 $ AUD loss in two quarters.

This was the moment when the director decided to give the traditional marketing sales team a pause. Sales managers also reported that sales executives are giving some false reports i.e while hanging out somewhere they are reporting that they were with clients and the deal did not crack. As a result, there was no transparency between the company and the sales team.

Here comes the savior DIGITAL MARKETING :

It was 1st week of April 2018, I got a text on SKYPE saying, ” Hey Jit, Mark gave me your skype, we need the help of a digital marketer and it’s urgent.”

Before taking any clients’ work I always talk to them and try to know why they are moving into digital marketing and what were challenges and issues they have faced with traditional marketing.

As I mentioned above they were facing many challenges i.e irrelevant leads and customers who did not even want a loan.

As far as I was able to trace the main problem was targeting. They never targeted the right audience.

If someone is having the surplus of money and he or she is an investor in several companies, why will they entertain someone who is offering a payday loan? In this industry target audience is the most necessary part of marketing.

After analyzing the whole scenario I advised Dan, who is the director of the financial company to go for a FACEBOOK lead ad campaign and keep only one sales team for leads follow up.

This was, of course, a saddening news for the sales teams because one of the sales team was about to get fired because of poor performance. They also said this is a wrong decision and digital marketing will never work. Also, two teams are necessary. But somehow the director decided and fired one team and kept the best team that performed better.

The winning team:

I decided to create a winning team that will make things happen and brings sales to the table.

My team had 5 members

Me (THE DIGITAL MARKETER)

Telecaller (LEAD NURTURING)

Three salespersons for follow up

We decided to generate 30 leads a day and give 10 leads to each salesperson.

How we started:

I created a FACEBOOK campaign where we targeted AUSTRALIA with both genders from 22-50 age. The age when people apply most of the loans in their life. We designed a nice single image ad with 1200×628 dimension and followed all the FACEBOOK guidelines

This was how the ad creative looked like

The result from the Facebook campaign stunned us, there was indeed huge potential for such business niche and people were very much eager to apply for loans. We got flooded with leads and most of them were positive leads who became our customers.

For better understanding here is the report:

From April to July 15th we got 474 leads at almost 50000 INR which is only 1000$ AUD + Agency charges. Here client got positive leads from customers who are really looking for a loan at 3-5$ per lead.

Out of those 474 leads, we converted almost 98 customers, that’s almost 21%. It was an unbelievable achievement for us. We did the double conversion in lesser time than that two teams were doing before.

At this situation cost to the company was almost half and the revenue was almost double. We invested only 1000$ for ads and got 98 sales. But before we used to get very few sales with 9000$ spent for both sales teams.

With such massive ROI and lead flow, we are still continuing with the campaign and we have enough leads to work for next 6 weeks. Isn’t that awesome?

CONCLUSION : Yes, Digital marketing was the savior at this situation but we also need a sales team to co-operate with the digital marketing team. Digital Marketing can generate positive leads and to convert those leads into sales you must have a telle caller and sales guy.

So this was the case study about one of my clients. There are many success stories that I have and I will come up in my next articles. If you have any questions or queries about digital marketing or Facebook ad campaigns feel free to mail me at hello@digitalsashtra.com